Thursday 17th November

I was walking in Green Park again today – and how different from just a few short weeks ago, the ground was now covered, layered and blanketed in leaves, leaves, leaves everywhere, and it was gorgeous.  Such rich reds and yellows and the palest of washed out greens and every possible shade of brown, and the trees were almost but not quite bare; and every so often as the wind combed through the branches a few leaves would be torn off and swirl, rise and fall and rise again and then drift slowly, dancing their way to earth.  And even here they weren’t still, little eddies kept swirling about, it was quite dry and though a lot of the leaves from earlier falls were damp and some in the pathways were all squished and mashed up, most were dry and rustled around like sand on a windy beach.

I bent down and picked up a few, some droopy chestnuts, a few squiggly oaks, a couple of simple planes and several large maples with their distinctive three large pointy lobes and two smaller side ones; I wrapped them in a few tissues and carried them home with me.

I laid them out on my glass-topped coffee table, and examined them closely.  Of course they were all so different, no two alike at all, though all basically the same design.  They all have a central stem, carrying the water from the roots and returning with the chemicals, basically sugar created by the chlorophyl’s interaction with sunlight.  Amazing technology, and far superior to anything dreamed up by man.  And all, well almost all, plants have leaves; they are one of the basic building blocks of nature, and we simply take them for granted.  Maybe they are more like living entities in themselves, working together like bees in a hive for the colony’s, the home tree’s benefit rather than just a small functioning part of the tree itself.  And like those bees, quite happy to surrender their life so that a new generation of leaves can appear, budding into life next spring.

I began to think about how many leaves there might be on a bush or a tree, was it thousands, or could it stretch to the tens of thousands, and then how many trees, shrubs and bushes there were in just a small area such as Green Park, and you soon reached numbers that made the recently announced seven billion humans seem very small indeed.  And each one is different, quite unique, though similar.  And this is the pattern throughout nature, multiple similar but slightly different structures creating a whole that is far greater than the sum of its parts.  And so on up the evolutionary scale, through the fishes and birds and insects and reptiles and mammals and eventually we get to humans, who are not so dissimilar from leaves; we are all unique, though far more similar than we might like to admit.  Though not yet so numerous, thank goodness.